P.J. BLOUNT Reprogramming the World Cyberspace and the Geography of Global Order This e-book is provided without charge via free download by E-International Relations (www.E-IR.info). It is not permitted to be sold in electronic format under any circumstances. If you enjoy our free e-books, please consider leaving a small donation to allow us to continue investing in open access publications: http://www.e-ir.info/about/donate/ i Reprogramming the World Cyberspace and the Geography of Global Order P.J. BLOUNT ii E-International Relations www.E-IR.info Bristol, England 2019 ISBN 978-1-910814-52-9 This book is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license. You are free to: • Share – copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format • Adapt – remix, transform, and build upon the material Under the following terms: • Attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. 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The website is run by a registered non-profit organisation based in Bristol, UK and staffed with an all-volunteer team of students and scholars. iv Acknowledgements This research has been supported throughout by a number of individuals. Scholarly support came from Prof. Jean-Marc Coicaud, Prof. Yale Ferguson, Prof. Ellen Goodman, and Prof. David Post. Each of these individuals gave valuable feedback during the drafting process. In addition to their support, the scholarship of each of these individuals played an important role in the final product. I would also like to thank Prof. Joanne Gabrynowicz who asked me to develop an International Telecommunications Law class at the University of Mississippi School of Law. The material gathered for that course was the bedrock on which this research is built. Additionally, I would like to thank T.J. Koger who helped me gather the materials that made up the initial syllabi in this class. Numerous friends who, though not subject matter experts, engaged repeatedly with me in discussions of my topic and posed challenging questions that shaped my thinking. In particular, I would like to thank: Wil Cook, David Molina, Christopher Hearsey, Jeff Benvenuto, Matthew Holly, and James Woods. My family for their support. My parents, Percy and Sandra Blount, provided me with a computer well before they were household items (a Commodore 64 is the first computer I remember), but also succumbed to my requests to get an Internet connection in 1994. One might argue that I’ve been thinking about this book ever since. Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Kelly Blount, for tolerating this project and its associated stacks of papers and books. I could not have done it without you, my love. v vi Reprogramming the World Contents INTRODUCTION 1. THE PROBLEM OF NEW SPACES 2 PART I: NETWORKED GEOGRAPHY 2. CYBER LANDSCAPES 16 3. LEGAL TERRAINS 40 4. POLITICAL PLACES 63 INTERLUDE 5. THE NOMOS OF CYBERSPACE 79 PART II: DIGITAL ENCOUNTERS 6. CONFLICTING TERRITORIES 95 7. STANDARDIZING AUTHORITY 115 8. UNBORDERED RIGHTS 134 CONCLUSION 9. REPROGRAMMING THE WORLD 156 BIBLIOGRAPHY 170 NOTE ON INDEXING 206 vii viii Reprogramming the World Table of Abbreviations AOL America Online CB Citizen Band Radio DBS Direct Broadcasting Satellite DMCA Digital Millennium Copyright Act DNS Domain Name System FTP File Transfer Protocol HTML Hypertext Markup Language HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure IANA Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICP Internet Content Provider IETF Internet Engineering Task Force IGC Internet Governance Communities IO International Organization IoT Internet of Things IRC Internet Relay Chat ISOC Internet Society ISP Internet Service Provider ITAR International Traffic in Arms Regulations ITU International Telecommunication Union NGO Nongovernmental Organization NSA National Security Agency NSF National Science Foundation MNC Multinational Corporation PCLOB Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board PGP Pretty Good Privacy PP-14 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2014 PSP President’s Surveillance Program R2P Responsibility to Protect TCP/IP Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol TV Television UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights UDRP Universal Dispute Resolution Policy UK United Kingdom UN United Nations UNCOPUOS UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space UNGA General Assembly URI Uniform Resource Identifier URL Uniform Resource Locater US United States USML United States Munitions List ix W3C World Wide Web Consortium WWW World Wide Web 1 Reprogramming the World Introduction “Sir, line your borders with soldiers, arm them with bayonets to keep out all the dangerous books which may appear, and these books, excuse the expression, will pass between their legs and fly over their heads and reach us.” Denis Diderot The Problem of New Spaces 2 1 The Problem of New Spaces In June of 2013, Edward Snowden ignited a global debate about the nature of government surveillance in the electronic sphere. The government documents leaked by the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor revealed mass electronic surveillance by the United States and a number of partner governments such as the United Kingdom.1 These leaks raised serious legal, political, and ethical questions about the nature of individual privacy in the face of secret government surveillance programs. The dominant narrative of the Snowden affair, as it unfolded in the media, was one of expanding government power impinging on individual rights in the electronic sphere. There was also a counter narrative involved in this incident that exhibits a complementary ebbing of the state’s power to control information. Perhaps the best illustration of this counter narrative is the farcical vignette that takes place in the basement of The Guardian’s building in London. In July of 2013, “a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverize the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted” leaks from Snowden were stored.2 These two men were overseen by note-taking government officials who had ordered the destruction of the equipment.3 This scene functions as a tableau that illustrates the core issue that Snowden exposed: the increasing dissonance Cyberspace causes in the application of state power. In The Guardian’s basement, the state appears in physical form and asserts a right to control information based on physical realities. It uses legal and physical coercion to destroy a machine that contains information. 1 Greenwald & Ball, “The Top Secret Rules That Allow NSA to Use US Data without a Warrant,” (2014); Hopkins & Borger, “Exclusive: NSA Pays £100m in Secret Funding for GCHQ,” (2013); and Dorling, “Snowden Reveals Australia’s Links to US Spy Web,” (2013). 2 Borger, “NSA Files: Why The Guardian in London Destroyed Hard Drives of Leaked Files,” (2014). 3 Id. 3 Reprogramming the World In the pre-digital era, the same tableau might have been one of police destroying a printing press; the destruction of a printing press being an efficient means of containing information and destroying a message. In the digital age, the UK government remained insistent on this same method of control. It physically destroyed the machinery of the newspaper, despite the fact “that other copies of the files existed outside the country and that The Guardian was neither the sole recipient nor steward of the files leaked by Snowden.”4 The effectiveness of the state’s power to coerce is limited within a specific space and time, because the object of its control existed outside the space of the state. More specifically, not only was this information outside of the space of the UK, it existed outside the space of any state. The leaks themselves existed in a global space. In the past, the rationale for destroying the printing press was linked to its locality and its central position in the distribution network for its messages. Now, the message is no longer linked to the locality of the machine, and in McLuhan’s word “the medium” has been transfused with “the message.”5 As a result, the state’s ability to control information is bounded, and The Guardian “preferred to destroy [its] copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze [its] reporting.”6 While the individuals using the angle grinders are helpless in the face of the state, the state is helpless in the face of technology: reporting on the leaks continued.